No comments about Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics (Anthem Nineteenth Century).

No comments about Dr Macnamara 1861-1931.

No comments about Winston Churchill.

No comments about The Life Of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

No comments about The Brontes: Branwell, Anne, Emily, Charlotte (Literature and Life).

No comments about Lettres de Charles VIII, roi de France: Tome 2. 1488-1489.

No comments about John Bright.

No comments about Victoria, Portrait of a Queen.

5 comments about Bad Blood: A Memoir.

1. I read through this book in a long afternoon, finding it totally engrossing. The story is about a young girl growing up under the roof of her grandfather, an intellectual vicar who led a double life of sex and booze, and her grandmother, an angry, disappointed anti-intellectual diabetic who lived for the treats of going to movies, candy, and scented soaps. The two detested each other, and their daughter wore herself out and sacrificed her personality to keep the household going in a very marginal way. The daughter had a daughter of her own, the author of this memoir, Lorna Sage. I don't think the point of this story is that her life was a nightmare, though it was hardly happy. It was about how, as humans, we all just keep making messes of our lives, generation after generation, and we all have our own family history and genetics which determine our strengths and our devastating flaws. Lorna inherited her grandfather's "bad blood", along with his use of books to escape both the place he was in (an isolated, wet, postwar depressed backwater), and the mess he was actively making of his life. In the middle of this mess, Lorna used this gift to survive, and even to struggle out of the quagmire by getting an advanced education.



2. This finely written memoir of her childhood as an Anglican minister's granddaughter. Today, or recently, [she died in 2001] Sage is an English literary critic and her memoir is both appreciably granular and endowed with a coherent overview. Highly recommended. Won the Whitbread Biography Award.



3. Holy moly! You wanna talk about a dysfunctional family? Here it is. It's during the years of WWII. The author's father is off fighting for God and country, and her mother is having a delayed adolescence, so author Lorna Sage is shipped to her grandparents house somewhere in rural England. Her grandparents are weird, weird, weird, but it is their very faults that ultimately make Sage, a well-known and powerful literary critic, into the person she becomes.
   Her grandfather is a debauched, intellectual, furious and infuriating vicar whose idiosyncrasies were seemingly limitless. Her grandmother's rage at her lot in life and the man who was responsible for it (and by extension, ALL men) never once abates - and you almost champion her for her constancy.
   Bad Blood reads as wicked fun with a strongly feminist underlying message. I loved it.



4. The story of an unexceptional childhood - mild neglect, some poverty and a very filthy home - neither sordid nor tragic nor eventful enough to be compelling reading. Especially for a person raised in India the dysfunctionality level of childhood/family seems average. The only redeeming feature is Lorna Sage's writing style. Witty and insightful. Normally this should raise a book to atleast 3 and a half stars but somehow this one does not quite make it past "interesting enough to read when there's nothing better to do". To use review cliches since they work so well in describing a book, it is readable but far short of unputdownable.



5. tough childhood, I wish Lorna Sage would write another memoir telling us how she's doing right now.
   I liked the book.

No comments about Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).